The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

364 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
Translation and Comments by P. Marais
(Letterhead omitted)
Re.: Topic of Gas Vans
[…]
Dear Mr. Marais,
Thank you very much for your letter of 30 October 1987, in which
you evince your interest in my elaborations on the development of gas
vans, and especially in questions which I did either not at all or hardly
explicitly addressed due to my approach.
Before answering the individual questions you posed, I want to
make a few fundamental remarks about my essay. My intention was to
elucidate a course of events of National Socialist mass killings which so
far has not been known in all its details. By so doing I manage to go beyond
the insights yielded by the individual penal trials. They relate to:
the connection between euthanasia and gas vans, the chain of command
during the development of the gas vans, the exact temporal sequence of
events, the persons and institutions involved, the number of gas vans in
the middle of 1942, the two series of gas vans, and the gas vans as link
between euthanasia and the killing with poisonous gas in the death
camps. I arrived at these results on the basis of documents and witness
statements, which, and I want to emphasize this, were subjected to thorough
source criticism and juxtaposition – procedures which are common
among historians.
Now to your questions.
1. Your description is valid only for the “second series” of gas vans,
the Saurer vehicles, because I managed to establish (see my paper pp.
413f.) that in 1941 only small vehicles were built. Apart, the original
Saurer vehicle was 5,800 mm long, and the number of persons gassed in
it was not “ca. 50” but between 80 and 100 persons. The file memo of 5
June 1942, which is not unknown to you, mentions 9 to 10 persons per
m 2 .
The problem of the large pressure developing in the cargo box seems
to have been known to the persons involved in the development and deployment
of the gas vans. This is suggested by the frequent measurements
conducted and by the already mentioned file memo of 5 June